Compassionate and commonsense therapeutic approach

GEORGE SZEGO July 19, 1928-March 31, 2024

George Szego, notable as a psychiatrist, a lecturer in medicine and a memoirist of the Holocaust, has died at 95.

Through his therapy and his writing, George brought powerful insights on the nature of desire, the trauma of migration and the long shadow of history’s worst genocide.

He grew up in the Hungarian town of Mezobereny, the only child of respected local doctor Istvan and his wife Klara. Istvan had converted the family to Roman Catholicism in the 1920s hoping to protect them from anti-Jewish laws. It didn’t work.

After the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, Istvan was called up for labour service and the Jews of Mezobereny were forced into ghettos and thereafter onto cattle trains for transport to an “unknown destination”. At the end of June, a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday, George arrived at the gates of Auschwitz alongside Klara and his maternal grandmother Sarah. He was immediately separated from both women; he never saw them again. Of Dr Mengele, he recalled: “He looked at me with an expression both kind and ironic, smiled and – delicately but decisively – flicked his index finger to the right.”

George spent a month in Auschwitz before he was transported to Muhldorf, a satellite camp of Dachau. There, he cheated death again and again until his liberation in May 1945.

Three months later he returned to Mezobereny for an emotional reunion with his father who had survived the war as a political prisoner. (Istvan would die seven years later from cancer.)

George Szego: retired at 88.Credit: Neil Newitt

Despite, or because of, the devastation of the Holocaust, George described the late 1940s as a time when he was “consciously happy”. He completed high school and enrolled in medicine at Budapest University. He acted in stage productions. At a New Year’s Eve party ushering in 1948 he locked eyes with Eva, a Jewish survivor of the labour camps, and like himself, determined to rebuild her shattered life. She would be his wife and professional colleague for the next 65 years.

After graduating in medicine, he avoided military service by getting a job as a doctor in the police force. Meanwhile, he embarked on a postgraduate degree in neurology; he was interested in the central nervous system and this led to an interest in psychiatry.

He became a doctor to the police force soccer club and was then appointed doctor to the nation’s gold-medal water polo team. The latter would be his ticket to freedom. After the bloody Soviet crackdown in 1956, he and Eva knew there was no future for them in Hungary. As doctor of the water polo team George was able to secure passports and visas for Eva and their young daughter, Klara. On a snowy morning in January 1957 they defected to Vienna, ending up in Israel.

George worked at a psychiatric hospital near Tel Aviv; Eva travelled to Jerusalem to complete her medical studies. But while they were happy in the Jewish state, George could not bear the volatile security situation so once again they made the agonising decision to leave.

They arrived in Australia in December 1958 with little English and with George suffering a bad case of dysentery. It was a harbinger of the tough and lonely years to come. As Eva once again resumed her medical studies, George struggled to convert his medical degree. Meanwhile, he could only find work as a cleaner at the Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital, where antisemitic German orderlies taunted him and eventually got him sacked – admittedly he was also a lousy cleaner.

Though George was grateful to Australia, he would never forgive its harsh treatment of foreign doctors. “My complaint is not about the exams,” he wrote, “but about the culture of humiliation that was not the norm elsewhere in the world.”

At his lowest point, a chance meeting with a doctor he knew from Budapest led to an interview with a kindly doctor, Ross Anderson, who gave him a job as a neuropathologist at Melbourne University. George knew very little about neuropathology, but the opportunity proved a circuit breaker. Before long he managed to convert his degree, get work as a lecturer in the medical school and pursue a doctorate in neuroscience.

Once Eva graduated in 1963, the couple ran a GP practice out of their two-bedroom flat in Elwood. As there were few Hungarian doctors in Melbourne at the time, fellow migrants flocked to them in gratitude. Within five years, working 12-hour days, they opened a surgery on the corner of Byron Street and Brighton Road in Elwood.

In the late 1970s, George was determined to reclaim his degree in psychiatry. A colleague warned him he would need to work harder than others to pass the notoriously difficult College of Psychiatry exams because the average psychiatrist was “Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and Mercedes-driving” while he was none of these. Still, he passed, and began a new career in his 50s. He became an accredited psychiatrist of the Melbourne Clinic and in the late 1980s, a senior psychiatrist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital where, at the suggestion of a colleague, he helped establish its first sexual dysfunction clinic.

The accolades accumulated – membership of the Neurological Association of Australia, the Medical Hypnosis Society, the Victorian Psycho-Sexual Society and the Society for Psychosomatic and Gynaecological Illnesses – as his practice thrived. Couples, in particular, appreciated his compassionate and commonsense therapeutic approach. Asked once if he subscribed to the Freudian school, he replied that his was “the Dr George Szego school”.

George continued to see patients in the private rooms he shared with daughter Klara (also a psychiatrist) until retiring in 2016 aged 88. By then, he had begun a third career of sorts as a writer; the title of his acclaimed autobiography Two Prayers to One God a reference to his Catholic-Jewish childhood. After Eva died in 2013, he found new love with an old friend, Kati. He wrote about that too in And the Rest is Yours.

Even as he grew frail, he retained a sharpness of mind, and was a source of warmth and wise counsel for his children and grandchildren – and for the broader public. “If I can offer any advice as a psychiatrist to a nation in quarantine it’s to preserve relationships because we need each other to get through this,” he wrote in The Age in 2020.

Post-October 7 he worried about the resurgence of anti-Semitism.

Despite a history of hypochondria, he confronted his own passing with grace. “Maybe I’ll recover like Moliere and The Imaginary Invalid,” he joked on his deathbed, a reference to the French playwright’s comedy about a hypochondriac.

In a piece marking the 70th anniversary of his liberation from the camps, he recalled how an American soldier cut the razor-wire fence, announcing to him and his fellow prisoners, “you are free”. “I didn’t say a word.”

“Often, I think back on those words and ask myself – am I really free? Remembering the smoke and the smell from the chimneys of the crematoria of Birkenau, it is hard to be entirely sure.

“My dear soldier, now I am able to speak. And what I want to say is, ‘Thank you.’ ”

Those who knew him are grateful, too.

He is survived by his partner Kati, two children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Klara and Julie Szego are George Szego’s daughters.